Yes, it was a curiously unreal world; and, for the first day or two, as Henry, bent, lonely and bewildered, over his desk, studied it furtively with questioning eyes, it seemed to him as though he had strayed into some asylum for the insane, where fantastic interests and mock honours take the place of the real interests and honours of sane human beings.
Part of the business of the firm consisted in the collection of house-rents, frequently entailing visits from tenants and questions of repairs. A certain Mr. Smith, a wiry little grey-headed man, with a keen face and a decisive manner, looked after this branch; and the gusto with which he did it was one of Henry's earliest and most instructive amazements. House-repairs were quite evidently his poetry, and he never seemed so happy as when passionately wrangling with a tenant on some question of drains. The words "cesspool" and "wet-trap"--words to which I don't pretend to attach any meaning--seemed to be particular favourites of his. In fact, an hour seldom passed without their falling from his lips. But Mr. Smith's great opportunity was a gale. For that always meant an exciting harvest of dislodged chimney-pots, flying slates, and smashed skylights, which would impart an energetic interest to his life for days.
Again, in Henry's department--for the office was cut into two halves, with about ten clerks in each, the partners having, of course, their own private offices, from which they might dart out at any moment--there was a certain little fussy chief clerk who was obviously a person of very mysterious importance. He was frequently away, evidently on missions of great moment, for always on his return he would be closeted immediately with one or other of the partners, who in turn seemed to consider him important too, and would sometimes treat him almost like one of themselves, actually condescending to laugh with him now and again over some joke, evidently as mysterious as all the rest. This Mr. Perkins seldom noticed the juniors in his department, though occasionally he would select one of them to accompany him on one of his missions to clients of the firm; and they would start off together, as you may see a plumber and his apprentice sometimes in the streets,--the proud master-plumber in front, and the little apprentice plumber behind, carrying the lead pipe and the iron smelting-pot.
Now, did Mr. Smith really take such a heart-interest in cesspools and wet-traps as he appeared to do? and did Mr. Perkins really think he mattered all that?
These were two of the earliest questions which Henry asked himself, and as time brought the answers to them, and kindred questions, there were unexpected elements of comfort for the heart of the boy, longing so desperately in that barren place for any hint of the human touch. One day Mr. Smith startled him by mentioning Dickens, and even Charles Lamb. It was a kindly recognition of Mesurier's rumoured interest in literature. Henry looked at him in amazement. "Oh, you read then!" he exclaimed. Of anything so human as reading he had suspected no one in that office.
Then as to the great Mr. Perkins, the time came when he was to prove very human indeed. For, dying suddenly one day, his various work had to pass into other hands; and, bit by bit, it began to leak out that those missions had not been so industriously devoted to the interests of the firm, nor been so carefully executed, as had been imagined. For Mr. Perkins, it transpired, had been fond of his pleasures, could appreciate wine, and liked an occasional informal holiday. So, posthumously, he began to wear for Henry a faint halo of humanity.
Indeed, it did not take Henry many days to realise that, as grass will force its way even between the flag-stones in a prison-yard, no little humanity contrived to support its existence even in this dead place. By degrees, he realised that these apparently colourless and frigid figures about him had each their separate individuality, engaging or otherwise; that their interests were by no means centred on the dull pages before them; and that, for the most part, they were very much in a like case with himself. Although thus immured from the world of realities, they still maintained, in vigorous activity, many healthy outdoor interests, and were quite keen in their enthusiasm for, and remarkably instructed in, the latest developments of horse-racing, football, and prize-fighting. Likewise, they had retained an astonishingly fresh and unimpaired interest in women, and still enjoyed the simple earth-born pleasures of the glass and the pipe.
As he understood this, Henry began to feel more at home; and, as the characters of his associates revealed themselves, he began to see that there were amongst them several pleasant and indeed merry fellows, and that, after all, fortune might have thrown him into much worse company. They, on their side, making like discoveries in him, he presently found himself admitted to their freemasonry, and initiated into their many secret ways of mitigating their lot, and shortening their long days. Thus, this chill, stern world of automata, which, on first sight, looked as if no human word or smile or jest could escape the detection of its iron laws, revealed, when you were once inside it, an under-world of pleasant escapes and exciting truancies, of which, as you grew accustomed to the risks and general conditions of the life, you were able skilfully to avail yourself.
The main principle of these was to seem to spend twice as much time on each task as it needed, that you might have the other half for such private uses as were within your reach,--to elongate dinner-hours at both ends so adroitly, and on such carefully selected propitious occasions, that the elongation, or at least the whole extent of it, would pass unobserved; and, in general, to gain time, any waste ends of five minutes or quarter hours, on all possible occasions. If the reader calls this shirking and robbery, he must. Technically, no doubt, it was; but these clerks, without so formulating it, merely exercised the right of all oppressed beings liberally to interpret to their own advantage, where possible, the terms of an unjust contract which grinding economic conditions had compelled them to make. They had been forced to promise too much in exchange for too little, and they equalised the disparity where they could.
Whether they spent the time thus hoarded in a profitable fashion, is a question of personal definition. It was usually expended in companies of twos or threes, with a pipe and a pot of beer and much spirited talk, in the warm corners of adjacent taverns; and, so long as you don't drink too much, there has perhaps been invented none pleasanter than that old-fashioned way of spending an hour. Certainly, it was the way for ale to taste good, and a pipe to seem the most satisfying of all earthly consolations. It was almost worth the bondage to enjoy the keen relish of the escape.
By degrees, though the youngest there, Henry came to be allowed a certain leadership in these sorties of the human element. He made it his business to stimulate these unthrifty instincts, and to fan the welcome sparks of natural idleness; and so successfully that at times there seemed to have entered with him into that gloomy place a certain Bacchic influence, which now and again would prompt his comrades to such daring clutches of animated release, that the spirit of it even pervaded the penetralia of the senior partner's office, with the result that some mishap of truancy would undo the genial work of months, and precipitate upon them for a while the rigours of a ten-fold discipline. It was after such an occasion that, in writing to James Mesurier as to the progress of his son, old Mr. Septimus Lingard had paid Henry one of the proudest compliments of his young days. "I fear that we shall make little of your son Henry," he wrote. "His head seems full of literature, and he is so idle that he is demoralising the whole office."
It took Henry more than a year to win that testimonial; but the odds had been so great against him that the wonder is he was ever able to win it at all. Mr. Lingard wrote "demoralise." It was his way of saying "humanise."
One day, however, Henry was to make the still more surprising discovery, that not only were the clerks human beings, but that one of the partners--only one of them--was also human. He made this discovery about the senior partner, whose old-world figure and quaint name, Septimus Searle Lingard, had, in spite of his severity, attracted him by a certain musty distinction.
A stranger figure than Septimus Searle Lingard has seldom walked the streets of any town. Though not actually much over sixty, you would have said he must be a thousand; his abnormally long, narrow, shaven face was so thin and gaunt and hollowed, and his tall, upright figure was so painfully fragile, that his black broadcloth seemed almost too heavy for the worn frame inside it. And nothing in the world else was ever so piercingly solemn as his keen weary old eyes. With his tall silk hat, his thin white hair, his long white face, long black frock-coat, and black trousers, he looked for all the world like a distinguished skeleton. Henry could never be quite sure whether he was to be classed as a "character," or as a genuine personality. One thing was certain, that, sometime or other, or many times, in his life he had done something, or many things, which had won for him a respect as deep as his solemnity of aspect; and certainly, if gravity of demeanour goes for anything, all the owls of all the ages in collaboration could not have produced an expression of time-honoured wisdom so convincing. Sometimes his old lantern-jaws would emit an uncanny cackle of a laugh, and a ghastly flicker of humour play across his parchment features; but these only deepened the general sense of solemnity, as the hoot of a night-bird deepens the loneliness of some desolate hollow among the hills.
It was this strange old ghost of a man that was to be the next to turn human, and it came about like this. Right away at the top of the building was a lonely room where the sun never shone, in which were stored away the old account-books, diaries, and various dead-and-done-with documents of the firm; and here too was deposited, from time to time, various wreckage of the same kind from other businesses whose last offices had been done by the firm, and whose records were still preserved, in the unlikely event of any chance resurrection of claim upon, or interest in, their long forgotten names.
Here crumbled the last relics of many an ambitious enterprise,--great ledgers, with their covers still fresh, lay like slabs, from which, if you wiped away the dust, the gilded names of foundered companies would flash as from gaudy tombstones; letter-books bursting with letters that no eye would read again so long as the world lasted; yellow title-deeds from which all the virtue had long since exhaled, and to which no dangling of enormous seals could any longer lend a convincing air of importance. Here everything was dead and dusty as an old shoe. The dry bones in the valley of Askelon were as children skipping in the morning sun compared with the dusty death that mouldered and mouldered in this lonely locked-up room,--this catacomb of dead businesses.
It was seldom necessary to visit this room; but occasionally Henry would find an excuse to loiter an hour there, for there was a certain dreary romance about the place, and the almost choking smell of old leather seemed to promise all sorts of buried secrets. It cannot be said that the place ever adequately gratified the sense of mystery it excited; but, after all, to excite the sense of mystery is perhaps better than to gratify it, and, considering its poor material, this room was quite a clever old mysteriarch.
One day, however, Henry came upon some writing that did greatly interest him, though it was almost contemporary. It was old Mr. Septimus Lingard's diary for the year preceding, which he had got hold of,--not his private diary, but the entirely public official diary in which he kept account of the division of his days among his various clients--for the most part an unexciting record. But at the end of the book, on one of the general memoranda pages, Henry noticed a square block of writing which, to his surprise, proved to be a long quotation from a book which the old man had been reading,--on the Immortality of the soul!
Had old Mr. Septimus Lingard a soul too, a soul that troubled him maybe, a soul that had its moving memories, and its immortal aspirations? Yes, somewhere hidden in that strange legal document of a body, there was evidently a soul. Mr. Lingard had a soul!
But wait a moment, here was an addition of the old man's own! The passage quoted had been of death and its possible significance, and it was just a sigh, a fear, the old man had breathed after it:How high has the winding-sheet encompassed my own bosom!
Solemn as were the words in themselves, they seemed doubly so in that lonely room; and Henry was glad to lock the door and return to the comparatively living world downstairs. But from that moment old Mr. Lingard was transfigured in his eyes. Beneath all the sternness of his exterior, the grimness of the business interests which seemed to absorb him, Henry had discovered the blessed human spring. And he came too to wear a certain pathos and sanctity in Henry's eyes, as he remembered how old a man he was, and that secretly all this time, while he seemed so busy with this public company and another, he was quietly preparing to die. From this moment tasks done for him came to have a certain joy in them. For his sake, as it were, he began to understand how you might take a pride in doing well something that, in your opinion, was not worth doing; and one day when the old man, well satisfied with some work he had done, patted him kindly on the back and said, "We'll make a business man of you after all!" the tears started to his eyes, and for a moment he almost hoped that they would.
By an odd coincidence, the night which had seen Henry and Esther confront their father, had seen, in another household in which the young people counted another member of their secret society of youth, a similar but even less seemly clash between the generations. Ned Hazell would be a poet too, and a painter as well, and perhaps a romantic actor; but his father's tastes for his son's future lay in none of these directions, and Ned was for the present in cotton. Now the elder Mr. Hazell was a man of violently convivial habits, and thebonhomie, with which he was accustomed to enliven bar-parlours up till eleven of an evening, was apt to suffer a certain ungenial transformation as he reached his own front door. There the wit would fail upon his lips, the twinkle die out of his glance, and an unaccountable ferocity towards the household that was waiting up for him take their place. When possible, he would fix upon some trivial reason to give an air of plausibility to this curious change in him; but if that were not forthcoming, he would, it appeared, fly into a violent rage for just that very reason.
However, on this particular night, Heaven had provided him with an heroic occasion. His son, he discovered, was for once out later than his father. In what haunt of vice, or low place of drinking, he was at the moment ensnared, no one better than his father could imagine. The opportunity was one not to be missed. The outraged parent at last realised that he had borne with him long enough, borne long enough with his folderols of art and nonsense; and so determined was he on the instant that he would have no more of it, that, with a quite remarkable energy, he had thereupon repaired to his son's room, opened the window, and begun vigorously to throw his pretty editions, his dainty water-colours, his drawers full of letters, his cast of the Venus of Milo, out on to the lawn, upon which at the moment a heavy rain was also falling.
In the very whirlwind of his righteous vandalism his son had returned, and, being a muscular, hot-blooded lad, had taken his father by the throat, called him a drunken beast, and hurled him to the floor, where he pinned him down with a knee on his chest, and might conceivably have made an end of him, but for the interference of mother and sisters, who succeeded at last in getting the dazed and somewhat sobered parent to bed.
Having raked together from the soddendébrisbeneath his window some disfigured remains of his poor treasures, Ned Hazell had left the house in the early hours of the morning, in good earnest for ever.
When he confided the excitements of the night to Henry at lunch next day, and heard in return his friend's news, nothing could be more plain than that they should set up lodgings together; and it was, therefore, to the rooms of which Ned was already in possession that Henry's cab had toppled with his various belongings, after those tearful farewells at his father's door. Esther followed presently to help make the place straight and dainty for the two boys, and having left them, late that evening, with flowers in all the jars, and the curtains as they should be, they were fairly launched on their new life together.
In Mike Henry had a stanch friend and an admirer against all comers, and in Henry Mike had a friend and admirer no less loyal; but their friendship was one for which an on-looker might have found it less easy to give reasons than for that of Henry and Ned. Mike and Henry loved each other, it would appear, less for any correspondence in dispositions or tastes, as just because they were Mike and Henry. Right away down in their natures there was evidently some central affinity which operated even in spite of surface contradictions. There was much of this intrinsic quality in the affection of Henry and Ned also, but it was much more to be accounted for by evident mutual sympathies. It was largely the impassioned fellowship of two craftsmen in love with the same art. Both had their literary ambitions; but, irrespective of those, they both loved poetry. Yes, how they loved it! Ned was perhaps particularly a born appreciator; and it was worth seeing how the tears would come into his fine eyes, as his voice shook with tenderness over a fine phrase or a noble passage. They had discovered some of the most thrilling things in English literature together, at that impressionable age when such things mean most to us. Together they had read Keats for the first wonderful time; together learned Shakespeare's Sonnets by heart; together rolled out over tavern-tables the sumptuous cadences of De Quincey. Wonderful indeed, and never to be forgotten, were those evenings when, the day at last over, they would leave their offices behind them, and, while the sunset was turning the buildings of Tyre into enchanted towers, and a clemency of release breathed upon its streets, steal to the quiet corner of their favourite tavern; to drink port and share their last new author, or their own latest rhymes, and then to emerge again, with high calm hearts and eloquent eyes, beneath the splendid stars.
All the arts within their reach they thus shared together,--pictures, music, theatres,--in a fine comradeship. Together they had bravoed the great tragedians, and together hopelessly worshipped the beautiful faces, enskied and sainted, of famous actresses. In fact, they were the Damon and Pythias of Tyre.
Once, long before the beginning of this story, Damon and Pythias were sitting in a theatre together, with the wonderful overture just beginning to steal through their senses.
Ah, violins, whither would you take their souls? You call to them like the voice of one waiting by the sea, bathed in sunset. What are these wonderful things you are whispering to their souls? You promise--ah, what things you promise, strange voices of the string!
Oh, sirens, have pity! Their hearts are pure, their bodies sweet as apples. Oh, be faithful, betray them not, beautiful voices of the wondrous world!
The overture had succeeded. Their souls had followed it over the footlights, and, floating in the limelight, shone there awaiting the fulfilment of the promise.
The play was "Pygmalion and Galatea," and at the appearance of Galatea they knew that the overture had not lied. There, in dazzling white flesh, was all it had promised; and when she called "Pyg-ma-lion!" how their hearts thumped!--for they knew it was really them she was calling.
"Pyg-ma-lion! Pyg-ma-lion!"
It was as though Cleopatra called them from the tomb.
Their hands met. They could hear each other's blood singing. And was not the play itself an allegory of their coming lives? Did not Galatea symbolise all the sleeping beauty of the world that was to awaken, warm and fragrant, at the kiss of their youth? And somewhere, too, shrouded in enchanted quiet, such a white white woman waited for their kiss. In a vision they saw life like the treasure cave of the Arabian thief; and they said to their beating hearts that they had the secret of the magic word, that the "open Sesame" was youth.
No fall of the curtain could hide the vision from their young eyes. It transfigured the faces of their fellow-playgoers, crowding from the pit; it made another stage of the embers of the sunset, a distant bridge of silver far down the street. Then they took it with them to the tavern; and to write of the solemn libations of that night would be to laugh or cry. Only youth can be so radiantly ridiculous.
They had found their own corner. Turning down the gas, the fire played at day and night with their faces. Imagine them in one of the flashes, solemnly raising their glasses, hands clasped across the table, earnest gleaming eyes holding each other above it.
"Old man, some day, somewhere, a woman like that!"
But there was still a sequel. At home at last and in bed, how could Damon sleep! It seemed as if he had got into a rosy sunset cloud in mistake for his bed. The candle was out, and yet the room was full of rolling light.
It was no use; he must get up. So, striking a light, he was presently deep in the composition of a fiery sonnet. It was evidently that which had caused all the phosphorescence. But a sonnet is a mere pill-box; it holds nothing. A mere cockle-shell,--and, oh, the raging sea it could not hold! Besides being confessedly an art-form, duly licenced to lie, it was apt to be misunderstood. It could not say in plain words, "Meet me at the pier to-morrow at three in the afternoon;" it could make no assignation nearer than the Isles of the Blest, "after life's fitful fever." Therefore, it seemed well to add a postscript to that effect in prose.
But then, how was she to receive it? There was nothing to be hoped from the post, and Damon's home in Sidon was three miles from the ferry. Likewise, it was now nearing three in the morning. Just time to catch the half-past three boat, run up to the theatre, a mile away, and meet the return boat. So down, down through the creaking house, carefully, as though he were a Jason picking his way among the coils of the sleeping dragon; and soon he was shooting through the phantom streets, like Mercury on a message through Hades.
At last the river came in sight, growing slate-colour in the earliest dawn. He could see the boat nuzzling up against the pier, and snoring in its sleep. He said to himself that this was Styx and the fare an obolus. As he jumped on board, with hot face and hotter heart, Charon clicked his signal to the engines; the boat slowly snuffled itself half awake, and shoved out into the sleepy water.
As they crossed, the light grew, and the gas-lamps of Tyre beaconed with fading gleam. Overhead began a restlessness in the clouds, as of a giant drowsily shuffling off some of his bedclothes; but as yet he slept, and only the silver bosom of his spouse, the moon, was uncovered.
When they landed, the streets of Tyre were already light, but empty, as though they had got up early to meet some one who had not arrived. Damon sped through them like a sea-gull that has the harbour to itself, and was not long in reaching the theatre. How desolate the play-bills looked that had been so companionable but three or four hours before! And there was her photograph! Surely it was an omen.
"Ah, my angel! See, I am bringing you my heart in a song. 'All my heart in this my singing!'"
He dropped the letter into the box; but, as he turned away, momentarily glancing up the long street, he caught sight of an approaching figure that could hardly be mistaken. Good Heavens! it was Pythias, and he too was carrying a letter.
The egregious Miss Bashkirtseff did not greatly fascinate Esther. Her egotism was too hard, too self-bounded, even for egotism, and there was generally about her a lack of sympathy. Her passion for fame had something provincial in its eagerness, and her broadest ideals seemed to become limited by her very anxiety to compass them. Even her love of art seemed a form of snobbery. In all these young Mesuriers there was implicit,--partly as a bye-product of the sense of humour, and partly as an unconscious mysticism,--a surprising instinct for allowing the successes of this world their proper value and no more. Even Esther, who was perhaps the most worldly of them all, and whose ambitions were largely social, as became a bonny girl whom nature had marked out to be popular, and on whom, some day when Mike was a great actor,--and had a theatre of his own!--would devolve the cares of populous "at home" days, bright after-the-performance suppers, and all the various diplomacies of the popular wife of fame,--even Esther, however brilliant her life might become, would never for a moment imagine that such success was a thing worth winning, at the expense of the smallest loss to such human realities as the affection she felt for Mike and Henry. To love some one well and faithfully, to be one of a little circle vowed to eternal fidelity one to the other,--such was the initial success of these young lives; and it was to make them all their days safe from the dangers of more meretricious successes.
All the same, though the chief performer in Marie Bashkirtseff's "Confessions" interested her but little, the stage on which for a little while she had scolded and whimpered did interest her--for should it not have been her stage too, and Henry's stage, and Dot's stage, father's and mother's stage too? You had only to look at father to realise that nature had really meant him for the great stage; here in Sidon, what was he but a god in exile, bending great powers and a splendid character upon ridiculously unimportant interests? Indeed, was not his destiny, more or less, their destiny as a family? Henry would escape from it through literature, and she through Mike. But what of Dot, what of Mat, not yet to speak of "the children"?
All she envied Marie Bashkirtseff was her opportunity. Great Goddess Opportunity! So much had come to Marie in the cradle, and came daily to a hundred thousand insignificant aristocratic babes, to approach which for the Mesuriers, even ten years too late, meant convulsions of the home, and to attain which in any satisfactory degree was probably impossible. French, for example, and music! Why, if so disposed, Marie Bashkirtseff might have read old French romances at ten, and to play Chopin at an earlier age was not surprising in the opportunitied, so-called "aristocratic" infant. Oh, why had they not been born like the other Sidonians, whose natures and ideals had been mercifully calculated to the meridian of Sidon! Why didn't they think the Proudfoots and the Wilkinsons and the Wagstaffs, and other local nobody-somebodies, people of importance, and why did they think the mayor a ludicrous upstart, and the adjacent J.P. a sententious old idiot? Far better to have rested content in that state of life to which God had called them. To talk French, or to play Chopin! What did it matter? In one sense nothing, but in another it mattered like other convenient facilities of life. To the immortal soul it mattered nothing, but to the mortal social unit it made life the easier, made the passage of ideas, the intercourse of individualities, the readier, and, in general, facilitated spiritual and intellectual, as well as social, communication. To be first-rate in your instincts, in all your fibres, and third-rate in your opportunities,--that was a bitter indignity of circumstance.
This sub-conscious sense of aristocracy--it must be observed, lest it should have been insufficiently implied--was almost humorously dissociated in the minds of the young Mesuriers from any recorded family distinctions. In so far as it was conscious, it was defiantly independent of genealogy. Had the Mesuriers possessed a coat-of-arms, James Mesurier would probably have kept it locked up as a frivolity to be ashamed of, for it was a part of his Puritanism that such earthly distinctions were foolishness with God; but, as a matter of fact, between Adam and the immediate great-grandparents of the young Mesuriers, there was a void which the Herald's office would have found a difficulty in filling. This it never occurred to them to mind in the least.
It was one of Henry's deep-sunken maxims that "a distinguished product implied a distinguished process," and that, at all events, the genealogical process was only illustratively important. It would have been interesting to know how they, the Mesuriers, came to be what they were. In the dark night of their history a family portrait or two, or an occasional reference in history, would have been an entertaining illumination--but, such not being forthcoming, they were, documentally, so much the less indebted to their progenitors. Yet if they had only been able to claim some ancestor with a wig and a degree for the humanities, or some beautiful ancestress with a romantic reputation! One's own present is so much more interesting for developing, or even repeating, some one else's past. And yet how much better it was to be as they were, than as most scions of aristocratic lineage, whose present was so often nothing and their past everything. How humiliating to be so pathetically inadequate an outcome of such long and elaborate preparation,--the mouse of a genealogical mountain! Yes, it was immeasurably more satisfactory to one's self-respect to be Something out of Nothing, than Nothing out of Everything. Here so little had made so much; here so much had made--hardly even a lord. It was better for your circumstances to be inadequate for you, than you to be inadequate for your circumstances.
Henry had amused himself one day in making a list of all their "ancestors" to whom any sort of worldly or romantic distinction could attach, and it ran somewhat as follows:--
(1) A great-grandmother on the father's side, fabled to live in some sort of a farm-house château in Guernsey, who once a year, up till two years ago, when she died, had sent them a hamper of apples from Channel Island orchards. Said "château" believed by his children to descend to James Mesurier, but the latter indifferent to the matter, and relatives on the spot probably able to look after it.
(2) A great-grandfather on the mother's side given to travel, a "rolling-stone," fond of books and talk, and rich in humanity. Surviving still in a high-nosed old silhouette.
(3) A grand-uncle on the father's side who was one of Napoleon's guard at St. Helena!
(4) A grandfather on the mother's side, who used to design and engrave little wooden blocks for patterns on calico-stuffs, and whose little box of delicate instruments, evidently made for the tracing of lines and flowers, was one of the few family heirlooms.
(5) A grandmother on the father's side of whom nothing was known beyond the beautiful fact that she was Irish.
(6) A grandfather on the father's side who was a sea-captain, sailing his own ship (barque "the Lucretia") to the West Indies, and who died of yellow fever, and was buried, in the odour of romance, on the Isthmus of Panama.
(7) An uncle who had also been a sea-captain, and who, in rescuing a wrecked crew from an Australian reef, was himself capsized, and after a long swim finally eaten by a shark,--said shark being captured next day, and found to contain his head entire, two gold rings still in his ears, which he wore for near-sightedness, after the manner of common sailors, and one of which, after its strange vicissitudes, had found a resting-place in the secretaire of his brother, James Mesurier.
Such was the only accessible "ancestry" of the Mesuriers, and it is to be feared that the last state of the family was socially worse than the first. James Mesurier was unapproachably its present summit, its Alpine peak; and he was made to suffer for it no little by humble and impecunious relatives. Still, whatever else they lacked, Henry Mesurier loved to insist that these various connections were rich in character, one or two of them inexhaustible in humour; and their rare and somewhat timorous visits to the castle of their exalted relative, James Mesurier, were occasions of much mirthful embarrassment to the young people. Here the reader is requested to excuse a brief parenthetical chapter by way of illustration, which, if he pleases, he may skip without any loss of continuity in the narrative, or the least offence in the world to the writer. This present chapter will be found continued in chapter sixteen.
Some peaceable afternoon when Mrs. Mesurier was enjoying a little doze on the parlour sofa, and her three elder daughters were snatching an hour or two from housework--they had already left school--for a little private reading, the drowsy house would suddenly be awakened by one loud wooden knock at the door.
"Now, whoever can that be!" the three girls would impatiently exclaim; and presently the maid would come to Miss Esther to say that there was an old man at the door asking for Mrs. Mesurier.
"What's his name, Jane?"
"He wouldn't give it, miss. He said it would be all right. Mrs. Mesurier would know him well enough."
"Whoever can it be? What's he like, Jane?"
"He looks like a workman, miss,--very old, and rather dotey."
"Who can it be? Go and ask him his name again."
Esther would then arouse her mother; and the maid would come in to say that at last the old man had been persuaded to confide his name as Clegg--Samuel Clegg.
"Tell the missus it's Samuel Clegg," the old man had said, with a certain amusing conceit. "She'll be glad enough to see Samuel Clegg."
"Why!" said Mrs. Mesurier, "it's your father's poor old uncle, Mr. Clegg. Now, girls, you mustn't run away, but try and be nice to him. He's a simple, good, old man."
Mrs. Mesurier was no more interested in Mr. Clegg than her daughters; but she had a great fund of humanity, and an inexhaustible capacity for suffering bores brilliantly.
"Why, I never!" she would say, adapting her idiom to make the old man feel at home, as he was presently ushered in, chuntering and triumphant; "you don't mean to say it's Uncle Clegg. Well, we are glad to see you! I was just having a little nap, and so you must excuse my keeping you waiting."
"Ay, Mary. It's right nice of you to make me so welcome. I got a bit misdoubtful at the door, for the young maid seemed somehow a little frightened of me; but when I told the name it was all right. 'Samuel Clegg,' I said. 'She'll be glad enough to see Samuel Clegg,' I said."
"Glad indeed," murmured Mrs. Mesurier, "I should think so. Find a chair for your uncle, Esther."
"Ay, the name did it," chuckled the old man, who as a matter of fact was anything but a humble old person, and to whom the bare fact of existence, and the name of Clegg, seemed warrant enough for thinking quite a lot of yourself.
"I'm afraid you don't remember your old uncle," said the old man to Esther, looking dimly round, and rather bewildered by the fine young ladies. Actually, he was only a remote courtesy uncle, having married their father's mother's sister.
"Oh, of course, Uncle Clegg," said Esther, a true daughter of her mother; "but, you see, it's a long time since we saw you."
"And this is Dorcas. Come and kiss your uncle, Dorcas. And this is Matilda," said Mrs. Mesurier.
"Ay," said the old man, "and you're all growing up such fine young ladies. Deary me, Mary, but they must make you feel old."
"We were just going to have some tea," said Esther; "wouldn't you like a cup, uncle?"
"I daresay your uncle would rather have a glass of beer," said Mrs. Mesurier.
"Ay, you're right there, Mary," answered the old man, "right there. A glass of beer is good enough for Samuel Clegg. A glass of beer and some bread and cheese, as the old saying is, is good enough for a king; but bread and cheese and water isn't fit for a beggar."
All laughed obligingly; and the old man turned to a bulging pocket which had evidently been on his mind from his entrance.
"I've got a little present here from Esther," he said,--"Esther" being the aunt after whom Mike's Esther had been named,--bringing out a little newspaper parcel. "But I must tell you from the beginning.
"Well, you know, Mary," he continued, "I was feeling rather low yesterday, and Esther said to me, 'Why not take a day off to-morrow, Samuel, and see Mary, it'll shake you up a bit, and I'll be bound she's right glad to see you?' 'Why, lass!' I said, 'it's the very thing. See if I don't go in the morning.'
"So this morning," he continued, "she tidies me up--you know her way--and sends me off. But before I started, she said, 'Here, Samuel, you must take this, with my love, to Mary.' I've kept it wrapped up in this drawer for thirty years, and only the other day our Mary Elizabeth said, 'Mother, you might give me that old jug. It would look nice in our little parlour.'" "But no!" I says, "Mary Elizabeth, if any one's to have that jug, it's your Aunt Mary."
"How kind of her!" murmured Mrs. Mesurier, sympathetically.
"Yes, those were her words, Mary," said the old man, unfolding the newspaper parcel, and revealing an ugly little jug of metallically glistening earthenware, such as were turned out with strange pride from certain English potteries about seventy years ago. It seemed made in imitation of metal,--a sort of earthenware pewter; and evidently it had been a great aesthetic treasure in the eyes of Mrs. Clegg. Mrs. Mesurier received it accordingly.
"How pretty," she said, "and how kind of Aunt Esther! They don't make such things nowadays."
"No, it's a vallyble relic," said the old man; "but you're worthy of it, Mary. I'd rather see you have it than any of them. My word, but I'm glad I've got it here safely. Esther would never have forgiven me.' Now, Samuel,' she said, as I left, 'mind you get home before dark, and don't sit on the jug, whatever you do.'"
Meanwhile the "young ladies" were in imminent danger of convulsions; and, at that moment, further to enhance the situation, an old lady of the neighbourhood, who occasionally dropped in for a gossip, was announced. She was a prim little lady, with "Cranford" curls, and a certain old-world charm and old-world vanity about her, and very deaf. She too was a "character" in her way, but so different from old Mr. Clegg that the entertainment to be expected from their conjunction was irresistible even to anticipate.
"This is Mr. Clegg, an uncle of Mr. Mesurier," said poor Mrs. Mesurier, by way of introduction.
"Howd'ye do, marm?" said Mr. Clegg, without rising.
Mrs. Turtle bowed primly. "Are you sure, my dear, I don't interrupt?" she said to Mrs. Mesurier; "shall I not call in some other day?"
"Oh, dear, no!" said Mrs. Mesurier. "Esther, get Mrs. Turtle a little whisky and water."
"Oh, my dear!" exclaimed Mrs. Turtle, "only the least little drop in the world, Esther dear. My heart, you know, my dear. Even so short a walk as this tires me out."
Mrs. Mesurier responded sympathetically; and then, by way of making himself pleasant, Mr. Clegg suddenly broke in with such an extraordinary amenity of old-world gallantry that everybody's hair stood on end.
"How old do you be?" he said, bowing to the new-comer.
"I beg your pardon," said Mrs. Turtle, putting her hand to her ear; "but I'm slightly deaf."
"How old do you be?" shouted the old man.
Though not unnaturally taken aback at such an unwonted conception of conversational intercourse, Mrs. Turtle recovered herself with considerable humour, and, bridling, with an old-world shake of her head, said,--
"What would you take me for?"
"I should say you were seventy, if you're a day," promptly answered the old man.
"Oh, dear, no!" replied Mrs. Turtle, with some pique; "I was only sixty last January."
"Well, you carry your age badly," retorted the old man, not to be beaten.
"What does he say, my dear?" said the poor old lady turning to Mrs. Mesurier.
"You carry your age badly," shouted the determined old man; "she should see our Esther, shouldn't she, Mary?"
The silence here of the young people was positively electric with suppressed laughter. Two of them escaped to explode in another room, and Esther and her mother were left to save the situation. But on such occasions as these Mrs. Mesurier grew positively great; and the manner in which she contrived to "turn the conversation," and smooth over the terrible hiatus, was a feat that admits of no worthy description.
Presently the old man rose to go, as the clock neared five. He had promised to be home before dark, and Esther would think him "benighted" if he should be late. He evidently had been to America and back in that short afternoon.
"Well, Mary, good-bye," he said; "one never knows whether we shall meet again. I'm getting an old man."
"Eh, Uncle Clegg, you're worth twenty dead ones yet," said Mrs. Mesurier, reassuringly.
"What a strange old gentleman!" said Mrs. Turtle, somewhat bewildered, as this family apparition left the room.
"Good-bye, Uncle Clegg," Esther was heard singing in the hall. "Good-bye, be careful of the steps. Good-bye. Give our love to Aunt Esther."
Then the door would bang, and the whole house breathe a gigantic sigh of humorous relief.
(This was the kind of thing girls at home had to put up with!)
"Well, mother, did you ever see such a funny old person?" said Esther, on her return to the parlour.
"You mustn't laugh at him," Mrs. Mesurier would say, laughing herself; "he's a good old man."
"No doubt he's good enough, mother dear; but he's unmistakably funny," Esther would reply, with a whimsical thought of the family tree. Yes, they were a distinguished race!